'American Lady' offers a portrait of Susan Mary Alsop

The Washington Post, The Washington Post, Getty Images

The Washington Post, The Washington Post, Getty Images

Amy D. Bernstein

When Susan Mary Alsop died in August 2004 at the age of 86, her death marked the end of a legendary era in Washington social and political life. The wife of columnist Joseph Alsop, she had a front-row seat in the theater of 20th century power players, was a friend to presidents, moguls, artists, movie stars, intellectuals and European leaders, and bore intimate witness to the history of her day, recording it in sprightly, intelligent letters to her husbands, children and friends.

Less well known is that she had a secret life, which included, among other things, an illegitimate child, a homosexual husband, near-anorexia and alcoholism. And while she herself was an impeccably pedigreed descendant of founding father John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, and her family moved in rarefied circles — her father, a career diplomat, was the frequent escort of Queen Marie of Romania, and her mother attended the marriage of Czar Nicholas II to Alexandra in St. Petersburg — she also had more than her share of sorrows and disappointments: an only sister who died early; an invalid husband she no longer loved who exhausted her during a protracted, agonizing decline; and lovers who never quite returned her passion.

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Now, a new biography offers some feminine insights into the life of this fascinating woman. "American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop" is written by a former French diplomat, Sophie-Caroline de Margerie, a member of the Conseil d'Etat, France's highest administrative court. Moving in similar social circles as her subject (de Margerie's parents-in-law, French Ambassador Emmanuel de Margerie and his wife, Hélène, were personal friends of Alsop's), de Margerie was given access to 500 of Susan Mary's previously unseen letters as well as to the unabridged diaries of Duff Cooper, former British ambassador to France and the father of Susan Mary's illegitimate son.

The result is a sensitive and respectful appraisal of her subject, but one that doesn't quite clinch the essential, if elusive, Susan Mary. Instead of giving us several sentences at a time of Susan Mary's writing — which her son does quite effectively in his 2008 book "My Three Fathers: And the Elegant Deceptions of My Mother, Susan Mary Alsop" — de Margerie mostly just weaves in phrases here and there and into her third person narrative. In addition, de Margerie glosses over the toll her affair with Cooper took on both her and her first husband, remarking only that she retained her "cheerfulness" in the most difficult situations and that husband Bill Patten accepted her infidelity with grace. The end result is that despite the richness of de Margerie's source material, her account never entirely conveys the charm and nuance of Susan Mary's expression, her often-marvelous observations and the clever wit that made her irresistible to so many men — and it understates the damage to her family caused by her relentless pursuit of power.

Born in Rome, where her father was a diplomat, Susan Mary spent her childhood in Italy and Argentina and returned to America in time to attend Foxcroft School, where she excelled. Although brainy enough to take classes at Barnard College, she never received a bachelor's degree. Instead, Susan Mary, vivacious, socially adept and strikingly attractive, had the dream of doing something more interesting with her life. At 21, she wangled a job at Vogue as a receptionist, writer and model. One memorable fashion shot shows her with Babe Paley, the stunningly beautiful wife of CBS founder William Paley, dressed in evening clothes and hanging from parachutes at the 1939 World's Fair. Before long, however, Susan Mary married Bill Patten, a charming junior diplomat who was posted to the American Embassy in post-war Paris.

Today, as de Margerie makes clear, Susan Mary likely wouldn't have settled for that. She would have been a journalist, diplomat or political activist like her lifelong friend Marietta Tree, another blue-blooded socialite and Democratic activist who became the United States representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Instead, in 1940s Paris, she embraced the most natural role for her gender and social class, becoming a noted salonnière. Following in the mold of the famous French aristocrat Madame de Staël, Susan Mary put together glittering evenings featuring witty, glamorous and important people from both sides of the Atlantic: Winston Churchill, the duke and duchess of Windsor, Duff and Diana Cooper, the Rothschilds, Cy and Marina Sulzberger, Evelyn Waugh, Louise de Vilmorin and Jean Cocteau, to name just a few.

If she wasn't giving a party, she was attending one, always well briefed on current affairs. Intensely interested in politics and history, Susan Mary was caricatured in Nancy Mitford's novels as the earnest Mildred Jungfleisch, who "puts aside certain hours every day for historical study." But despite her friend's wicked takedown, she seemed to bear the teasing with typical good nature, even giving copies of Mitford's books to some of her friends.

Like many in her social set, Susan Mary didn't let her marriage prevent her from having a few discreet affairs with men far more prominent than her first husband. The first affair was with Duff Cooper, who became British ambassador to Paris in 1944 and her lover in 1947. Cooper was the great passion of her life, according to her friends. Even though he was an inveterate philanderer, well into his 50s and already in declining health when they met, Susan Mary, just 29, fell under his spell. After Cooper died in 1954, Susan Mary went on to have an affair with Gladwyn Jebb, one of Cooper's successors as the British ambassador to France, who held the post when the two began their affair.

Susan Mary's first husband finally died of complications from emphysema in 1960. Even though she had long since stopped loving him, Bill's death left Susan Mary alone and grieving. Within a year, however, she moved to Washington to marry Joseph Alsop, one of Patten's oldest and closest childhood friends and a Groton and Harvard classmate.

It was a brilliant marriage of convenience. Joe Alsop was a confirmed homosexual, a fact he confided to Susan Mary before they married. But he was also the capital's most influential journalist at the time and had an especially close and cordial relationship with President John F. Kennedy. As a result the Alsop home became the place for power players to congregate. It was there, as Nancy Mitford once put it, that Susan Mary could watch "history on the boil." And boil it did: President Kennedy held up dinner one night for a serious tête à tête with the French ambassador in the Alsops' garden. What became known as the Cuban missile crisis burst into the news the next day.

Despite their social successes together, however, Joe's and Susan Mary's marriage fell apart in 1973. Alone once again after the divorce, Susan Mary at last was free to pursue a career as a writer, penning several critically successful books whose subject matter clearly betrays her own interest in power and backroom diplomacy. In 1974, she published "To Marietta from Paris 1945-1960," an edition of letters she had written to Marietta Tree; in 1977, a biography of Vita Sackville-West's mother; in 1982, "Yankees at the Court: The First Americans in Paris"; and in 1984, "The Congress Dances," about the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna. She also wrote numerous articles in Architectural Digest about the homes of her famous friends.

As she grew older, Susan Mary began to drink heavily. After several blackouts, concerned friends and family members forced her to spend some time drying out in a clinic. During the intervention, she dropped a bombshell: In the course of her affair with Cooper, she revealed, he had fathered her son, Bill, a secret that Susan Mary kept from the latter until he was 47, with understandably devastating emotional repercussions. To outsiders, Susan Mary's life had always seemed perfectly orchestrated, but the effort required to maintain that airy illusion inexorably took its toll.

Amy D. Bernstein is an author and literary agent who lives in New York City.